The Nevada Senate Race as Change's Comeuppance

The last in a week-long look at the five basket-case races worth keeping your eyes on through a crazy campaign season.

They've been through a lot together, but it's hard to say if the Reid-Obama pairing is exactly a match made in heaven. The last eighteen months have at times been a frustrating game of Mother, May i? Obama is cool, cerebral, analytical. Senator Reid is a cautious builder of centrist consensus, saddled with a Democratic caucus of fraidycats and Joe Lieberman and a Republican caucus of John Birchers. Put that all together and, well, some pretty damn decent things can still almost happen. You get a monumental political win on health-care reform that leaves the insurance companies in charge. You get Wall Street reform that leaves the fraudsters pretty badly gummed. You don't get a serious climate-change bill done at all because Obama decides at the last moment that he's not really that into the whole thing now anyway. Meanwhile, of course, the Arctic has been melting, as have Harry Reid's political fortunes back home, where he's standing for reelection.

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And then the Republicans held a primary, and their leading candidate, Sue Lowden, who had come out for return to a system by which patients would barter goods with their doctor for services — she specifically mentioned chickens as an instrument of exchange — was toppled by perhaps the purest instrument of undifferentiated Tea Party rage and bafflement. Enter Sharron Angle.

She once belonged to the Independent American Party, which took a hard right turn at Father Coughlin and kept going into the far beyond. She things Social Security is a violation of the First Commandment. She suggested that if she lost the election, her voters might well have to resort to "Second Amendment remedies." She once thought that black football uniforms were "thoroughly evil" tools of the devil. And, for those of you nostalgic for the conspiracy theories of the Eisenhower era, Angle is opposed to fluoridation, too.

And all of this is in response to the lukewarm measures on important issues that Harry Reid, for all his shortcomings, muscled through on behalf of Barack Obama, for all of his. This race will be seen as a "referendum" on what change there has been since 2008, but it ought more rightly to be judged as a referendum on how batshit we are going to allow our nation to go in response to it.